The mega-project generates extremely intense laser flashes, at a mind-boggling rate of 27,000 per second, inside a 3.4-kilometre tunnel below the northern city of Hamburg. At the heart of the 1.5-billion-euro facility is the ultrafast X-ray laser strobe light, which will allow researchers for the first time to look deep inside matter and take snapshots and "molecular movies". "The game could be a chemical process, a biological process, it could be how you get energy from sunlight. XFEL -- which stands for X-Ray Free-Electron Laser -- is all about looking at things at the hard-to-fathom nano-level. The electrons gather into a multitude of ultrathin discs, allowing them to emit their light in sync and produce intense X-ray flashes of laser light.

Source: The Local September 02, 2017 09:45 UTC